gmwnet.com: Garrett M. Wiedmeier

Firefox is now my primary browser

As a geek-in-residence, I have about 5 different web browsers that I banter back and forth in my web surfing. Each one of them had advantages and weak spots.

So the Mozilla people released Firefox 3.0 with much fanfare this week, so of course I upgraded. I have used earlier versions and thought it was a competent browser, but wasn’t my favorite. Well, I got to give kudos — FF3, at least to me, seems so much more polished, faster and “ready”

The killer deal for me was a select set of “addons” that you can install within Firefox. These addons have become so important and complete that it’s almost like another operating system. I can do most things Internet-related within my web browser session. I use:

Ad Blocker Plus

All-in-one sidebar

Sage-Too for RSS feeds

Webmail notifier

Download Statusbar

IE Tab

IE Tab is what makes Firefox my primary browser now. Some of their sites just won’t work without it. IE Tab allows you to open a new tab/window within FF using the IE rendering engine so that all that stuff works. As a bonus you can write rules that look at URLs you click and open all such certain web addresses using IE Tab automatically. So now when I visit anything with “microsoft.com” in it, IE Tab takes over and the web pages work. Everything else Firefox handles. Nice!